NBC Direct Uninstallation wont complete

NBC Direct is a software that will be installed on your computer if you want to watch the videos offered on the NBC Direct website.

To be precise, you can only watch those movies if you install NBC Direct prior to this, as media streams are blocked otherwise until you do.

Before NBC Direct is installed the Open Case Media Agent is installed on your system as well which is used for distributing content and managing rights.

I did install the service so that I could write about it and test it out, and ran into a problem when I tried to uninstall NBC Direct again once I was finished.

The uninstallation procedure hangs and I would have to press cancel to stop it. There was no progress and no information why it would not complete the uninstallation of NBC Direct.

My feeling was that it had something to do with the Open Case Media Agent service that was running on my system and I decided to stop the service. After stopping the service I tried to uninstall NBC Direct again and it completed the uninstallation in no time.

My conclusion is to uninstall (using the normal Windows Add / Remove Programs menu for instance) the components the following way:

Uninstall the Open Case Media Agent first. This gets rid of the service running in the background all the time.

After this uninstall NBC Direct which will now uninstall completely.

Update: Please note that NBC has moved away from using NBC Direct or Open Case Media Agent for that matter. If you are in the U.S. right now, you can head over to NBC to watch full episode shows all without having to install third-party software to do so.

The streaming seems to rely on Adobe Flash, so make sure that Flash is installed on your system before you head over there. If it is not, you will receive an error message on the site.

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Comments

Thanks for the helpful post. Yesterday they released a new version of NBC Direct (allowing P2P downloads of HD versions of the shows) and it seems to be a little less buggy than the first, thankfully. It’s still a little annoying that there’s only one bloody commercial, only at least this time it’s for Intel and not Dove.

Tried going to the Add/Remove programs list and selecting Media agent and NBC Direct but neither one has the remove button come up as a option. Anyone have any idea why this might be or know another way to uninstall them?

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.